Chapter 7: Evaluate Your Onboarding Path
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Transcript: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1A3HHVeZjE3zIjUvqcDcOPSWmE0rmU5ZtFAlro2ydwrs/edit#heading=h.3x1wa7tarrfi
Chapter 08: Evaluate Your Onboarding Path
Clutter is the official language used by corporations to hide their mistakes.
- William Zinsser
One of my dream cars is the Porsche Carrera GT. It can go 0 to 100 km/h in 3.57 seconds, all thanks to its 603 horsepower engine and curb weight of about 3,000 pounds.
Compare that with my current car, a Toyota Corolla, which has a 132 horsepower engine and weighs about 3,100 pounds. Not only does the Porsche have four times more horsepower than my Corolla, but it also weighs almost 100 pounds less!
The Porsche Carrera GT is a perfect example of how to make a car drive faster. First, increase the power the engine produces. Second, remove any unnecessary items to make the car as light as possible.
The second option is often the easiest, fastest, and cheapest way to speed up a car. Rip out the sound system, remove the bits of junk from the trunk, and (if you really have the need for more speed) pull out the rear seat. The 100-pound weight loss will make the car accelerate a tiny bit quicker.
The same can be said of user onboarding. When it’s bloated with too many unnecessary steps, new users will abandon an app and leave it for good. Users have little to no patience to read long directions and no time for steep learning curves. The default is to find the easiest and quickest path. That’s why the First Strike needs to be hit as quickly as possible.
In this chapter, we’ll map out and evaluate the path for new users to ensure every step in the early stages of your customer’s journey is as efficient and effective as possible.
The Straight-Line Onboarding
In the previous chapter, I introduced Wes Bush’s Bowling Alley framework and the concept of the First Strike—when first-time users achieve their desired outcome. In 10-pin bowling, that’s when all of the pins are knocked down with a bowling ball. Sounds easy enough, right?
In reality, it’s really hard. The narrow oiled bowling lane is 41.5 inches wide, and the ten pins are 60 feet away. On both sides of this lane are gutters.
The goal is to roll a heavy ball straight down the lane to knock down as many pins as possible. A “strike” is when all of the pins are hit on the first try. A “spare” is when no pins are left standing after the second round.
If you’re new to bowling, you’ll quickly realize how hard (and frustrating!) it is to hit any of the pins. Chances are, the majority of your balls will end up in the gutter.
That’s where gutter bumpers come into play; they block balls from falling into the gutter to give you some assurance some of the pins will actually be hit.
When it comes to user onboarding, bumpers help new users achieve their First Strike. Bumpers include conversational triggers (such as onboarding emails, SMS, browser notifications) and in-app triggers (such as welcome messages, product tours, and progress bars). I’ll be covering these bumpers more in the next chapter.
For now, it’s time to identify the path that will help users achieve their First Strike. If you’ve watched professional bowlers, you’ll notice how they curve the ball down the lane. This allows them to find the sweet spot that results in a strike. This is for pros, though. Beginners need to learn how to roll the ball straight down the lane first.
In user onboarding, this is called Straight-Line Onboarding. It’s the minimum number of steps users need to take to achieve their First Strike. In my experience, most onboarding experiences are anything but a straight line. Well over 30% of them are superfluous and end up creating more friction for new users than necessary.
Creating a Straight-Line Onboarding experience is critical in getting more users to experience a product’s value. You’re in a race against time. The goal is to decrease the time-to-value (TTV), the amount of time it takes a new customer to realize the value of a product. A short TTV means customers receive a faster return on their investment of time—and that means they are more likely to stick around!
With this in mind, here are three steps to building your own Straight-Line Onboarding experience.
How To Build Your Straight-Line Onboarding
To help you visualize this, I’ll be going through the steps to develop the Straight-Line Onboarding of a fictional online party invitation tool that I’ll call PartyParrot.
1. Map out your onboarding path
The first step is to sign up for your own product as if it’s your first time. It’s probably been a while since you’ve done that. More likely than not, it’s been a while since anyone in your company has done that.
The goal is to come in with a fresh perspective and map out each step in the user experience before they become highly-engaged users. To do this, you’ll want to go beyond filling in the form on your site. Go through the motions of signing up to study the first impression of your product, whether that’s a Google search, paid ad, blog post, or email invitation.
Since PartyParrot is a non-existent tool, let me give an example with Canva. Someone might discover it by Googling “Instagram post design template.”
The very first result on the search engine results page (SERP) is a landing page dedicated to Canva’s Instagram post templates.
This link leads to a page with several Instagram post templates.
From there, users can select a template, edit it, add their own photos and then download their masterpiece.
And voila, just like that, they’ve achieved their First Strike.
These first few touchpoints are key for users to experience the wonder of Canva for the first time. Here’s the entire onboarding path from a Google search:
Notice how the first two steps aren’t even part of the website; they both occur on the SERP. Don’t forget that user onboarding doesn’t typically start on a website. It begins with the very first touchpoint.
Another remarkable aspect about Canva’s onboarding path is that users don’t have to sign up at all to experience Canva’s First Strike; their growth team has clearly optimized their user onboarding experience.
Now it’s your turn: document every step that’s required for users to achieve your product’s First Strike. Be sure to reference every field that you’re asking users to complete, including each button they need to click. I also recommend taking a screenshot of every step so you can refer to it later (you’ll need this for later steps in the framework).
If you’re doing this with the onboarding team in a room, you can use sticky notes and markers. Write down each step in one sticky note. For this exercise, consider each field a user has to fill out as an onboarding step. So if there are ten fields on a signup page, that’s eleven steps, including clicking on the submit button.
If your team is remote, you can use tools like Trello, Notion, or Miro. I’ve listed out every step in Canva’s onboarding process with Trello at bit.ly/canva-path.
For the remaining steps, I’ll use PartyParrot as an example. Let’s say the current onboarding path from their website looks something like this:
2. Evaluate each step.
The next step is to evaluate each onboarding step for three components:
- Necessity
- Ease
- Simplicity
A) Necessity: remove or delay any steps that don’t lead to the First Strike
Each step in the onboarding path is yet another opportunity for users to drop off. Go back to your onboarding path and evaluate if the value of each step outweighs the risk they pose of a drop-off. Any steps that add more friction for users to achieve the First Strike should be removed or delayed.
Use green, yellow, and red labels to easily identify where each step falls in the onboarding process:
Green labels are steps that are absolutely necessary for new users to achieve the First Strike. I.e., asking for an email address during the signup process.
Yellow labels are steps that can be delayed after the First Strike, like setting up an advanced feature or running split tests.
Red labels are steps that can be removed completely. This could be adding a backup email address or asking for a nickname when setting up their account.
Do this step collaboratively with the onboarding team.
Ask each team member to label every step on their own. Then, go through each step together to identify which ones are necessary. Removing the red and yellow ste
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